The personal blog of Peter Lee a.k.a. "China Hand"... Life is a comedy to those who think, a tragedy to those who feel, and an open book to those who read. You are welcome to contact China Matters at the address chinamatters --a-- prlee.org or follow me on twitter @chinahand.

Sunday, September 28, 2014

From Xinjiang to Hong Kong, the PRC Reaps the Bitter Fruits of Alienation

It’s becoming easier to understand why the PRC landed on
Ilham Tohti, the Uyghur “public intellectual” like a ton of bricks.

Judging from the admittedly selective excerpts used at the
kangaroo court to damn him to “indefinite detention”, reported perhaps not
inaccurately in the West as a “life sentence”, Ilham hoped to use his bully
pulpit at a Xinjiang university to nurture a cadre of students with a strong
sense of Uyghur identity, alienated from the PRC regime, and convinced of the
right and need to agitate for greater Xinjiang autonomy in the face of an alien
occupying power.

Then, perhaps, Xinjiang politics would have evolved into the
politics of perpetual, continually aggravated, and burgeoning grievance and ever-more-entrenched
spirit of resistance that one sees in Palestine…or on the streets of Hong Kong
today.

The Hong Kong police showed a poor understanding of the
street theater of populist politics in response to the provocations of the student
vanguard of the Occupy movement, trotted out the tear gas and rubber bullets in a misguided effort to clear roads in the Admiralty district, and have lost the
public relations battle for now, and perhaps forever. [As a commentator pointed out, the use of tear gas and rubber bullets in Admiralty was a tactical move by the police to clear certain areas, not a response to a potential storming, as was the case of the pepper spraying at the government headquarters the day before.]

In retrospect, perhaps the strategists in Hong Kong and
Beijing might have concluded it would be better for the police to stand by and
allow the students to storm their way into various government offices--over the
weekend, for goodness sakes!—and let public opinion chew for a few days over
the issue of whether it welcomed this kind of confrontational politics.After all, that’s how the much-maligned KMT
government in Taiwan handled the Sunflower occupation of the Legislative Yuan a
few weeks back; as a result, the PR gains of the students appear to have been
relatively transitory, and the uneasy balance between “let’s give the PRC the
middle finger” and “don’t rock the boat” factions seems to have been preserved.

Based on dismal results in places like Egypt, Pakistan, and
Ukraine, I am not a big fan of “student activists raise a ruckus in the main
square” brand of democracy.If Hong Kong
democracy activists had wanted to give voice to the popular mood, instead of
driving the opinion process through confrontational street action, they could
have organized boycotts of the 2017 polls (which, if the relevant bill passes
the local legislature, will involve universal popular suffrage to vote for
candidates screened by a committee of presumably PRC-inclined worthies).

However, the alienation of many Hong Kongers, particularly Hong
Kongers on the younger side of an increasingly stark generational divide,
toward the PRC and the disruptions that PRC citizens have brought to the
economic and social life of the city, is profound; and the PRC’s disturbing (and
perhaps violent) efforts to put a tighter leash on the local media indicates
that Beijing is actively attempting to manage and restrain political expression
in Hong Kong.

An unofficial civic referendum (actually offering democracy
supporters a choice between three different pro-democracy options) attracted
almost 800,000 voters, equivalent to about 1/5 of the city’s electorate.

So, there was a big fat fuse just lying there, and Occupy
Hong Kong decided to light it, starting with a class boycott and demonstrations
organized by the Hong Kong Federation of Students.And, since I’m never afraid to mix a
metaphor, the Hong Kong government poured fuel on the fire by pepperspraying
and teargassing it.

Over at Reuters, John Pomfret provided
some context for the police response.

Hundreds of pro-democracy activists
stormed government headquarters late on Friday after student leaders demanding
greater democracy urged them to charge into the compound.

Police
used pepper spray as the protesters smashed barriers and climbed over fences in
chaotic scenes in the heart of the Asian financial centre, following Beijing's
decision to rule out free elections for the city's leader in 2017.

One
student leader, Joshua Wong, a thin 17-year-old with dark-rimmed glasses and
bowl-cut hair, was dragged away by police kicking and screaming as protesters
chanted and struggled to free him.

Wonder how much of that context will be remembered by
the media, much of which has put on its Tiananmen! Today! goggles as well as
teargas goggles to report the unrest.

Tiananmen 1989 was a remonstrance/petitioning movement that
eschewed disobedience beyond passive resistance and had no political endgame
beyond hopes that the regime would respond to its moral suasion by implementing
democratic reforms.If there were
political calculations to utilize the demonstrations to advance a concrete
agenda, they came from reformers inside the elite.

Occupy Hong Kong is a carefully planned program of civil
disobedience, escalation, and provocation meant to provoke a political crisis
that will polarize Hong Kong opinion on behalf of the democracy movement and
force the elite to support the demands of the movement in order to maintain
their local positions of power and prosperity.

And, to make an observation that will probably not endear me
to the democracy movement, the 1989 student movement was a popular response to a
marked crisis of governance, economic management, and corruption by the PRC
regime.On the other hand, it appears to
me that the Occupy Hong Kong movement was sparked by the announcement of a proposed
reform for the 2017 election—universal suffrage—and the calculation by democracy
activists that the experience of actually voting for some candidate, albeit
Beijing vetted, might fatally beguile Hong Kongers with the PRC’s
implementation of managed democracy and make agitation for full democracy more difficult.

It should also be said thatDr. Benny Tai, one of the organizers of the Hong Kong movement, is no
Wuerkaixi, the grandiose, self-aggrandizing, and ultimately feckless face of
the 1989 movement.He is a law professor
at University of Hong Kong, smart and savvy, and I think he has envisioned
plausible endgames that don’t involve Beijing sending in the army to crush
local unrest a la Tiananmen and martyr his student activists—though I’m sure
this is one of the critical scenarios he has to game.

For me, a key “tell” as to the fortunes and strategy of the
democracy movement as the political crisis evolves will be whether and how it
focuses its ire on the business elite that provides the local support and
financial muscle for Beijing’s control of the territory.

Will some tycoons be tagged as collaborators and find their
local reputation and interests threatened?While others are quietly approached to suggest the advisability of
hedging their bets between Hong Kong and Beijing?Time, as they say, will tell.

I imagine that the first reaction of Xi Jinping and the CCP will
be frustration with their local cats’-paws in Hong Kong for failing to keep a
lid on the situation and, when things got out of hand, inflaming it.So I guess the Hong Kong portfolio will be
handed to some clandestine crisis-management team.

As to the options available to Beijing, one is, of course,
Send in the Tanks! and endure international obloquy and the undying hatred of
the citizens of Hong Kong.

Another, which attracts less interest among the
Tiananmen-fixated, is to let Hong Kong stew in its own juice, allow the
dysfunction to burgeon until a local backlash is triggered or, failing that, at
least the local worthies have had enough and publicly petition Beijing to help
them out of the mess, perhaps through an ultimatum coupled with some post-2017
legal legerdemain relating to the electoral commission.

Western reporting seems to be all over the map, albeit with
a heavy Tiananmen Redux overlay in many occasions.

There is a significant population of journos that Beijing
has expelled or otherwise mistreated, some of them are in Hong Kong or itching
to get there, and I suspect many of them, while maintaining the strictest
standards of reportorial objectivity, will not be unhappy for this opportunity
to put the boot in on the regime.

One of the most irritating canards that is presumably a
Occupy Hong Kong meme that some journalists have picked up is “Xi Should Be
More Like Deng” i.e. adopt Deng’s flexible, pragmatic ways in dealing with the
Hong Kong situation.

The Chinese were ready to resort to
"requisition by force" if the negotiations had set off unrest in the
colony, said Lu Ping, who later headed negotiations with Chris Patten, the last
governor.

Baroness Thatcher said later that Deng
Xiaoping, then China's leader, told her directly: "I could walk in and
take the whole lot this afternoon."

Deng was also the architect of Hong Kong’s managed democracy structure.

And, of course, Deng greenlighted the entry of the armed forces into Beijing
on June 3-4, 1989.

With Tiananmen on the lips of so many commentators, the assertion that Xi
Jinping should take his grievance-management cues from Deng Xiaoping is
borderline ludicrous.

Selective memory has also found its way into reporting (or
at least headline-writing) broadcasting Occupy’s claims that the current
democracy movement was triggered by Beijing “reneging” on its promise of
democracy for Hong Kong by scheduling universal suffrage for 2017, but
insisting that only candidates vetted by the commission could run for office.

As far as I understand it, the commission set-up was
integral to Beijing’s foundational plan for Hong Kong.In other words, the PRC would commit to fifty
years of free rein for business/society only if the direct democracy genie
could be kept in the bottle by controlling the list of candidates eligible for
office.

I also suspect that the PRC told the Thatcher government
that, if the UK tried to belatedly introduce full direct democracy in Hong Kong
prior to 1997 (as Chris Patten championed) and burden the PRC with the
unpleasant task of rolling back a democratic status quo when it claimed
sovereignty over the territory, that would be a trigger for the real Occupy
Hong Kong…by China.

As noted above, Deng Xiaoping was the conceptual architect
of the strategy to install a “kill switch” on Hong Kong democracy and balance
Hong Kong’s economic and social freedoms under the “one country two systems”
formula with political control by keeping hostile administrators out of the
Hong Kong political mix.

Some requirements or
qualifications should be established with regard to the administration of Hong
Kong affairs by the people of Hong Kong. It must be required that patriots form
the main body of administrators, that is, of the future government of the Hong
Kong special region. Of course it should include other Chinese, too, as well as
foreigners invited to serve as advisers. What is a patriot? A patriot is one
who respects the Chinese nation, sincerely supports the motherland's resumption
of sovereignty over Hong Kong and wishes not to impair Hong Kong's prosperity
and stability. Those who meet these requirements are patriots, whether they
believe in capitalism or feudalism or even slavery. We don't demand that they
be in favour of China's socialist system; we only ask them to love the
motherland and Hong Kong.

And here’s how that intention was implemented in Article 45
of the Hong Kong Basic Law, which became the effective constitution of Hong
Kong upon reversion in 1997:

The Chief Executive of the Hong Kong Special
Administrative Region shall be selected by election or through consultations
held locally and be appointed by the Central People's Government.

The method for selecting the Chief Executive shall
be specified in the light of the actual situation in the Hong Kong Special
Administrative Region and in accordance with the principle of gradual and
orderly progress. The ultimate aim is the selection of the Chief Executive by
universal suffrage upon nomination by a broadly representative nominating
committee in accordance with democratic procedures.

Clearly, the PRC’s envisioned terminus (the “ultimate aim”)
of the democratic reform line is universal suffrage to vote for candidates put
forth by a nominating committee, not universal suffrage in the nomination as
well as election process, which is the Occupy Hong Kong movement’s demand.

If the PRC government revised, promised to revise, or hinted
it would revise this understanding to do away with its most important tool for
controlling electoral politics in Hong Kong, the nominating committee, please
let me know.Until then, I will regard
the “China reneged/broke its democracy promise” line as a canard peddled to
provide unnatural enhancement to the legitimacy of the Occupy movement.

“We don’t like the Basic Law and want to overturn it after
17 years through street action” is, I suppose, a tougher sell than “China broke
its promise” but, in my opinion, it’s more honest.

But I have a feeling that legalistic quibbling has been
overtaken by the outrage that “the Hong Kong government gassed its own people”
which, perhaps, is the place that the democracy movement hoped the debate would
end up in the first place.

3 comments:

CCP is doing its darnest to infuriate the minorities and democracy seekers. The ban on Cantonese on TV news in Guangdong will create a second Xinjiang in Guangdong, while it is certainly not making friends in HK using heavy handed tactics against the students.

What do you think of this NYT article that claim that the ruling of August 31 triggered the protests? http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/30/world/asia/the-hong-kong-protests-what-you-should-know.html

You write that it were "clear" that candidates would have to be approved by Beijing according to the Basic Law. Do you have anything substantial to back this claim up? Or has this part intentionally been left ambiguous and there was no clear hint how the interpretation would turn out?